Last week Andrew Chen wrote an excellent post about achieving critical mass for your social network.
Andrew tends to focus very much in the social network aspects of the Internet, but between social network and non-social network there is something else. Something called Sampa.
Sampa is not a social network because people don't join Sampa. Sampa is also not like Ning because people are not building social networks. In Sampa people are building *their* private place on the web. The basic difference on this context is that on a social network everyone is equal. Everyone creates a profile. Everyone can add content, upload pictures, edit the family tree, etc.
On Sampa, the site owner is the king. People don't "join Sampa". People "join your site". Actually, that's not even true. Your friends and family are *added* to your site (like on Google Groups).
There is a big difference because the cost of joining is pretty high compared to the cost of doing nothing from a visitor's point-of-view. In other words, if I tell you to join my social network you are expected to go somewhere, fill out some form, upload your avatar, pick a password, etc. If somebody adds you to their Sampa site, you are just part of it. Done.
But that is just the beginning of the differences; the biggest difference is on the aspect of content creation. In any social network, be it the smallest of social networks created on Ning or on Facebook, the life blood of it is people actively participating on it, which means to update their status, to upload pictures, to write blog posts, add messages to forums, etc. If you have just one or two users doing that, the social network collapses in the dust it accumulates everywhere.
On Sampa, you only need 1 motivated content creator for the site to work. All other users can happily be "passive" users, just consuming that content.
The great aspects of this, is that Sampa monetizes out of content consumers (like Google Search), not content creators (like Facebook or Ning users).
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
